Increasingly users are taking their computing devices with them as they travel. These devices are frequently used when employees give presentations. The presentations can occur via the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW), via a webcast, and/or live in person at a site where the presentations are given. Many times while a user gives a presentation, a variety of problems can occur.
For example, the user may engage in an interactive question and answer period and during such time the user's Internet connection is dropped because of lack of detected activity. Another situation is that the user's screen saver kicks in to display some potentially embarrassing photos of the employee. Still further, someone may instant message (IM) the user during the presentation and a popup window with the text of the IM may appear for all to see even when the message was intended to remain private.
Moreover, it is not just public presentations that cause problems for users. That is, the user may be privately working on their laptop on an important project and because the user is thinking or doing something else for a brief intervening period, the laptop can unilaterally take some action that the user does not want to occur, such as putting the hard disk to sleep, turning off the power, disconnecting from the Internet, etc.
As still another example, the user may be processing an important application or attempting to get a presentation out for management, when the user's monthly virus scan kicks to scan the user's hard drive for viruses or when the user's virus software performs a daily or weekly update to catch new virus definitions from the vendor. In these situations and others, the user can become extremely frustrated and if the user is not savvy enough the user will have to wait for the other activity to subside before the user can effectively continue the work that the user was initially focused on. In some situations, the user wants maximum processing throughput and does not want normal scheduled activities to take place and thereby consume some much needed processing cycles of the user's computing device.
Thus, what is needed is a mechanism for custom controlling a user's desktop state.